Words of Wisdom for November 20, 2025

Study, for me, has always been an integral part of my practice. I find it hard to understand how someone could somehow dismiss it as irrelevant or missing the point. I hear people say things like, you know, “I don’t need to study, I want to practice.” The best response I’ve heard to that was when I was training as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, 30 or 40 years ago. We were doing a course, which was extremely dry, on Buddhist logic and syllogisms with an old Mongolian Lama called Geshe Ngawang Nyima. And one of the students at the end of the class said, “Why do we have to do all this study? Why can’t we do more practice?” And he said, “If you really knew how to study, you would be practicing.” That, to me, has always been my point of reference with regard to this question. Study — developing and refining one’s critical faculty of reason — is an integral part for me of what it means to arrive at a fully rounded comprehension of a particular theme or topic or insight of the dharma.

– Stephen Batchelor, Lion’s Roar

May you be free from suffering and the causes of suffering!

All my best,

–Jerome